somewhere i remember reading advice for beginning writers not to show their work to anyone at least that in the early stages the author argued that it took all of the power out of the idea like a pressure-release valve before any of that creative power got to be applied to the page it made me think of meditation at legunitas when hass writes that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea as a self-confessed general idea person i identify with the remark it does seem as though no matter how lofty the idea i originally have for a poem once i sit down to write the thing i quickly get bogged down in the details the particulars i guess the writer of that lost article must work the same way leading to their advice if the luminous clarity of a general idea is so fragile that just beginning to write it down ruins it somehow telling people about it is even worse but back to that robert hass poem while he does say that thing about the luminous clarity of a general idea and he adds to it that a word is elegy to what it signifies his tone is lightly chiding this philosophy he opens his poem with all the new thinking is about loss / in this it resembles all the old thinking which to my mind lampoons both the new and the old thinking for not having anything new ultimately to say he attributes these thoughts to a friend whose voice carried a thin wire of grief a tone / almost querulous about that loss of luminous clarity the speaker of hass's poem remembers a woman he made love to once and this image takes over the poem in all its specificity from her small shoulders to his childhood river / with its island willows to the way her hands dismantled bread even in disproving his friend's remarks through his imagery the speaker of meditation at legunitas admits that it hardly had to do with her and here is the heart of what hass is saying about poetry a poem hardly has to do with what it is written about on the surface level as richard hugo says it in a famous essay a poem has a triggering subject and it has a real or generated subject which for hugo in meditation at legunitas is something about the way that not only general ideas but particulars such as the body or hands or the thing her father said that hurt her which is such a beautiful generality that is somehow also a particular truth are luminous to poetry and to life-as-lived the philosophers can say what they want but we experience the world bodily and particularly to ourselves there's still a problem with language however to which hass speaks by the end of his poem with those repetitions of blackberry blackberry blackberry in that as jack gilbert says in his poem the forgotten dialect of the heart how astonishing it is that language can almost mean / but frightening that it does not quite there is still that irritable reaching after fact reason that language as communication requires i think keats would agree that he wrote about a near-unattainable ideal in his letter that only shakespeare and maybe coleridge and a few others could achieve this negative capability gilbert furthers keats in asserting that no matter what we write the words / get it wrong that utterance is itself that irritable reaching in gilbert's poem though he does reach after something in the second half of the poem he begins to imagine what the mysterious sumerian tablets could be as poetry instead of just business records my joy is the same as twelve ethiopian goats standing in the morning light o lord thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper as grand as ripe barley under the wind's labor her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered egyptian cotton my love is a hundred pitchers of honey shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body giraffes are this desire in the dark this is my favorite part of the poem and i think it is because gilbert like hass reaches for the specific in the general he brings huge ideas like the lord or love or joy into the specific images of salt copper or honey or like he says at the end of his poem what we feel most has / no name but amber archers cinnamon horses and birds this ultimately is what keats was getting at and hugo too that the real subject of any poetry is not capturable in the words of the poem but that rather a poem speaks around its subject to be honest all art may do this what sets a poem apart is its honesty about that fact